Finding The Mother Tree: Discovering The Wisdom Of The Forest Quotes
"From death and decay springs new life, and from this birth will come new death."
"The forest itself is part of much larger cycles, the building of soil and migration of species and circulation of oceans."
"There is a necessary wisdom in the give-and-take of nature—its quiet agreements and search for balance."
"The trees soon revealed startling secrets. They are in a web of interdependence, linked by a system of underground channels."
"These discoveries are challenging many of the management practices that threaten the survival of our forests."
"The trees have shown me their perceptiveness and responsiveness, connections and conversations."
"The older trees are able to discern which seedlings are their own kin."
"The old trees nurture the young ones and provide them food and water just as we do with our own children."
"When Mother Trees die, they pass their wisdom to their kin, sharing the knowledge of what helps and what harms."
"The forest is wired for wisdom, sentience, and healing."
"Some rings were wider, having grown plenty in rainy years, others were almost too narrow to see, having grown slowly during a drought."
"We think of science as a process of steadily moving forward, with facts dropping into place along a neat pathway."
"The forest would always be our life’s blood."
"The trees grew in clusters, like chicks clutched around a mother ptarmigan."
"These saplings were growing happily where there was barely any water."
"The trees grew in these draws because their dense bottlebrush needles required lots of water."
"I can’t tell if my blood is in the trees or if the trees are in my blood."
"Yeah, the bastard was crazier than a shithouse rat."
"His trophy buckle, big as a dinner plate, boasted a longhorn steer."
"Uncle Wayne made it his business to know everything about everyone."
"Kelly understood when people like me had to vanish into thin air."
"We had run out of words, even though there was still so much to say."
"I sped on my bike through the Douglas-fir forest."
"The fungus was growing on the roots of this healthy tree."
"The relationship between the tree and the fungus was so robust that the fungus had borne fruit."
"These authors were suggesting that cooperation was essential to evolution."
"The trees had saved us, and I wondered if I could help my company find a new way to harvest them while protecting the plants and animals."
"The prisoners grumbled as they walked toward us, forming a patter-song of curses."
"Neither of us felt good about killing the plants, but this time our greater purpose was more firmly in mind."
"The scene flashed before my eyes: they’d share the deadly clippings with their babies in burrows, and they’d all die belowground."
"The ringleader fell silent, and the guard and my forestry colleague marched them down the trail and into the van."
"Kelly looked proficient in his jeans and cowboy boots, a carpenter’s belt slung around his waist, ready to finish the gate."
"Dad fiddled with the rubber headband of his fist-sized headlamp."
"The heavy metal suitcase that housed the pressure chamber looked as if it might have held a bomb during the Cold War."
"I turned on the Walkman I’d borrowed from Jean. Dire Straits’ 'Walk of Life' sang through the night."
"I hated the neutron probe. It was old and heavy, and the cable was sticky."
"It was a tough time of year, one of rounding up cattle and pulling the sprinkler pipes out of fields for the winter."
"The irony of the bar fight is that it slammed up against the very question I had been pursuing in my doctoral dissertation about collaboration in nature."
"By October, I had the foliar nitrogen data in my hands."
"I worried about what the Forest Service folks would think, but I couldn’t let go of this possibility."
"I’d read that the photosynthate was unloaded from the root tips into the mycorrhizal fungal partners, like freight unloaded off boxcars onto trucks."
"Trees are tightly attuned, shifting their behaviors according to the functioning of their community."
"The seedlings in the threesome were so close they seemed bound in a common story—with some type of beginning, middle, and end."
"If cedar roots acquire any of the sugars fixed by fir or birch, they would have picked it up after it was leaked from their roots into the soil."
"The more shade the tents cast, the steeper the source-sink gradient from birch to fir."
"Birch and fir were trading carbon. They were communicating."
"The dynamics of the mycorrhizal network were starting to make sense."
"Ecosystems are so similar to human societies—they’re built on relationships."
"Our success in coevolution—our success as a productive society—is only as good as the strength of these bonds with other individuals and species."
"By being in place together in a network of fungi and bacteria, birch and fir shared resources, even as they outgrew each other and cast shade."
"The sharing of energy and resources meant they were working together like a system."
"Our systems develop into something whole and resilient. They are complex. Self-organizing. They have the hallmarks of intelligence."
"While they discussed my fate, I was nurturing Hannah, her bushel of dark hair and archiving eyes traced directly to Don, tying us all together."
"A fellow researcher, delighted at my nerve, emailed congratulations and a picture of a pile of painted rocks."
"In the mornings, I’d feel strangely calm and patient even though I was drained after sleepless nights feeding Hannah."
"Home in the afternoon, I’d set Hannah in the shade of the old Douglas fir for a nap, her bassinet no taller than the seedlings that had found a perch there."
"My father would have been just as confused or shocked—breastfeeding was not in fashion in their generation."
"When Hannah wasn’t sleeping, she was glued to my hip, absorbing my every move as I talked on the phone with reporters."
"I stood outside, lungs heaving as I listened to her cries, my world unraveling."
"As many months ticked by, I sensed more keenly that it was still my duty to explain my discoveries to the policymakers and forest practitioners."
"The belief that competition was the only plant-to-plant interaction that mattered was so strong."
"I was getting better at taking such dismissive criticisms with a grain of salt."
"Geez, dying isn’t that straightforward for a tree."
"The beetles kill the old pines, and then fire melts the resin in the cones to release the seeds."
"Suppression of fire had allowed many trees to reach such an old age."
"The past few decades of fire suppression had created a vast landscape of aging pines ripe for an epic infestation."
"Some will live, but most will die," I replied.
"The outbreak is so intense most trees can’t fend off the bugs."
"Survivors should produce new generations better adapted to pitch out the beetles."
"I needed to take a longer view instead of being so obsessed with the dying trees."
"It’s even possible the firs and pines can warn each other about infestations."
"Trees communicating their stresses to other nearby trees."
"The line hummed with the sound that the deepest quiet makes."
"Sending them her last drops of water, along with some nutrients and food."
"The trees had perished so swiftly, and the beetles had spread so rapidly."
"These trees seemed sacrificed for the sake of human convenience."
"I’d never seen carbon after a defoliation migrate into the shoots of a neighbor."
"The single characteristic of people who survive cancer: they never give up hope."
"You have got to pull yourself together for Nava."
"I was happy that my recent work was being well received."
"I’m all right" but dropped onto a stump to take notes.
"Your body will follow your thoughts, so think healing thoughts."
"The birches and firs talk to each other underground through a fungal web."
"You just hiked two thousand feet in two hours."
"Nature itself had blurred the rigidity of my experiment."
"I think the trees had been telling me something all along."
"Dying enabled the living; the aged fueled their young."
"The trees of the next generation... ought to be the most successful in rebounding from whatever tumult lies ahead."
"The rest of the planet has been waiting patiently for us to figure that out."
"Everything has a purpose, and everything is in need of care."
"Underground signals carried through common mycelial networks warn neighbouring plants of aphid attack." - Babikova et al., 2013.
"Mycorrhizal networks affect ectomycorrhizal fungal community similarity between conspecific trees and seedlings." - Bingham & Simard, 2012.
"Mycorrhizae transfer carbon from a native grass to an invasive weed: Evidence from stable isotopes and physiology." - Carey et al., 2004.
"Melatonin and serotonin: Mediators in the symphony of plant morphogenesis." - Erland et al., 2018.
"Functional complementarity of Douglas-fir ectomycorrhizas for extracellular enzyme activity after wildfire or clearcut logging." - Jones et al., 2010.
"Reciprocal rewards stabilize cooperation in the mycorrhizal symbiosis." - Kiers et al., 2011.
"New policies needed to save our forests." - Simard & Lewis, 2011.
"Mycorrhizal networks and seedling establishment in Douglas-fir forests." - Simard, 2012.
"Resource transfer between plants through ectomycorrhizal networks." - Simard et al., 2015.
"Kin recognition affects plant communication and defence." - Karban et al., 2013.